In 2007, the then President of the Republic inaugurated the exhibition Isis and the Feathered Serpent, in Monterrey, Nuevo León, which had been cured, as far as Egypt was concerned, by Dr. Zahi Hawass, a prominent Egyptian archaeologist. The part of Mesoamerica corresponded to me, and I remember that a few days before this event I had a very important sensation as a researcher: I went through the rooms destined for Egypt and remembered that my passion for this civilization had led me to study archeology. . I admired in my tour those sculptures that represented the moon goddess Isis and the way in which for nearly three thousand years, and even more, she had been worshiped. But something caught my attention. All those wonders had been made in a sandy, desert environment, eventually bathed by the overflow of the Nile River. This landscape lasted throughout those hundreds or thousands of years and still happens. I visited the rooms dedicated to Mesoamerican cultures and then the revelation occurred: while in Egypt the human work had been carried out in the middle of the desert, Mesoamerica showed Quetzalcóatl in an amazing diversity of natural environments: there were the sculptures of the central highlands; we could appreciate the works carried out in the jungle where the Mayan culture had excelled; the stone-carved serpents of northern Yucatan; the impressive figures made by Mixtecs and Zapotecs in the mountains of Oaxaca; the delicate elaboration of objects in the humid coast of the Gulf, and the sequence of presences of the god in diverse places of the center of Mexico. This led me to think about the variety of styles and materials in each of those regions that ancient man had transformed into a work of art. They were different expressions in different environments, with different languages ​​and a common denominator: the presence of the numen through the stone, the mud, the mural painting and the pictographic miniatures of the codices.
Months later, the idea of ​​mounting an exhibition about six Mesoamerican cities that had emerged in this diversity of ecosystems matured. This took place in the National Museum of Anthropology and was entitled Six ancient cities, society) 'environment; the six cities were Monte Albán, Palenque, Tajín, Teotihuacán, Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, depending on the location of each one. What I want to get to is to comment on how, in few parts of the world, this variety of expressions has been created in ecological media as diverse as in Mesoamerica. But there is something else that directly concerns 1 works made by ancient stone sculptors, something that has always powerfully caught my attention: in pre-Hispanic art nothing stopped the artist to make pieces that ranged from the most complex abstraction to the purest realism . Today I want to present nine pieces from different Mesoamerican cultures in which, in my opinion, it is expressed or before said.
Let us explore the area of ​​ancient Mesoamerica to penetrate the time and space of these manifestations that speak for themselves.